So apparently the story goes something like this: Rick Moody, who’s a genuinely nice guy even though he was thoroughly unimpressed by a joke I threw at him moments before I introduced him onstage at IFOA a few years ago, got convinced to post a new story by Twitter. Unfortunately, the great folks at Electric Literature didn’t take into account the exponential returns of multiple postings and asked 20 others to simultaneously post excerpts with Moody. The result was chaos as people who followed multiple posters had no idea where they were and their feeds were filled with what increasingly looked like spam from Rick Moody. Lesson learned? Poor guys. Moby runs it down here.

The unexpected barrage of Moody quickly set off a stream of angry and mocking tweets from other users yesterday–and Twitter is an excellent instrument for spreading negative feedback quickly–as bookseller Arsen Kashkashian wrote, “Is Rick Moody trying to sabotage what’s left of his career in 1 day. Worst use of Twitter I’ve ever seen. Please, please stop the madness.”

As Kellog observed afterward on Book Jacket, “Twitter has a viral recirculation tool — retweeting, or an RT in a post — which is organic and feels like a shared secret. But this project isn’t using retweeting, it’s simply sending out the same broadcast from many places at once — leaving the receiver to feel like he or she has been attacked by clones. No fun … it shows that Twitter as a storytelling form hasn’t been fully exploited — yet,” although she says, “What role Twitter eventually will take in our culture — other than short-attention-span distraction — is hard to predict. But surely it is a possible venue for telling short stories, and Electric Literature is to be commended for splashing in with this one.”